Dear members and friends of Northern Peninsula District 2,

I greet you all in the name of our loving Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus. I trust that you are all keeping warm and dry in these cold and wet days of an approaching winter season. As we are getting ready for winter, let us also prepare ourselves for the grand appearing of our Lord Jesus. As we have been studying in our Sabbath School study guides for this quarter, we have come to believe that before Jesus comes again the church will face difficult times. Indeed, we used to speak about the last days that are still approaching, but now we are coming to the realization that these are the last days that we are living in.

Jesus warned us against false teachers1 who would come with false teachings. Even Ellen White warned us to be wary of people who come with supposed “New Light.”2

Recently, everybody’s focus and attention were shifted to searching God’s Word and the Spirit of Prophecy regarding the nature and function of the Holy Spirit. Some have abandoned the truth that the Holy Spirit is a member of the Godhead. I have written the following and pray that you will prayerfully study God’s Word and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth as Jesus promised He would do.

Thirteen out of twenty-seven books in the New Testament are known to be authored by Paul. While the Trinity is not absent in the Old Testament and in the Gospels, we derive much of our theology regarding the doctrine of the Trinity from Pauline letters. This is mainly because the Old Testament places emphasis on Jehovah’s interaction with humanity while the Gospels focus on the life and ministry of Jesus the Christ. But Paul does not mention the Holy Spirit in any of his salutations to the churches to whom he writes. This has caused concern amongst Trinitarians as some anti-Trinitarians have used this to combat the doctrine of the Trinity.

The Salutation

Paul usually starts his letters by greeting the saints in the name of the God the Father and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. His persistent omission of the Holy Spirit in his salutations is considered as proof that Paul never believed that the Holy Spirit was a distinct divine Person in the Godhead. According to the United Church of God “If God were a Trinity, surely the Apostle Paul, who recorded much of the theological underpinnings of the early Church, would have understood and taught this understanding. Yet we find no such concept in his writings.”3 Paul’s standard greeting in his letters is usually, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ,” without any reference to the Holy Spirit. This same greeting occurs in all of the thirteen letters in the New Testament which bears Paul’s signature (Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3; 2 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:3; Ephesians 1:2; Philippians 1:2; Colossians 1:2; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:2; 1 Timothy 1:2; 2 Timothy 1:2; Titus 1:4; and Philemon 1:3). The Holy Spirit is persistently left out of these greetings and this is perceived as “an unbelievable oversight if the Holy Spirit were indeed a person coequal with God and Jesus Christ”.4 Of course, the anti-Trinitarians provide more reasons as to why they deny the Holy Spirit His existence but for the sake of this letter I only focus on why I think the Holy Spirit is left out of the salutations of Paul and even deliberately so in the case of the salutation of the book of Romans.

In his salutation in the opening verses of Romans (1:1-7) Paul makes mention of All Three Persons of the Godhead. The only difficulty we face is that he refers to the Holy Spirit in an unusual way – “the Spirit of holiness” (1:4). This is the only instance in the Bible where Paul refers to “the Spirit of holiness.” Then immediately after this portion of scripture, he inserts his famous greeting in the name of only the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. His exclusion of the Holy Spirit, in this case, has led others to conclude that Paul never acknowledged and taught the Holy Spirit as an equal to the Father and Jesus Christ.

The argument of silence

I will now first examine why this argument is feeble and then attempt to provide reasons as to why Paul does not include the Holy Spirit in his greetings. The argument that suggests that Paul never believed the Holy Spirit to be a distinct Person of the Godhead because He is not mentioned is called the argument from silence. “An argument from silence fallaciously reasons that if a particular speaker or writer did not mention something it must be because he was ignorant of it (or even that he would have denied it, given the chance)”.5 The same Paul never refers to the virgin birth of Jesus. This is however no grounds for accepting that Paul was opposed to the virgin birth. The immanent Trinity (how the Godhead is composed) is not Paul’s concern in his letters. Paul does not spend any time in any of his letters developing the doctrine of the Trinity for it is not his subject matter to the churches. Most of the time he demonstrates his understanding of the economic Trinity, how each Member in the Godhead functions in the plan of salvation.

The economic Trinity

In tracing the plan of salvation as laid out in Romans 1 – 8, Paul presents All Three Members of the Godhead as actively involved in the plan of salvation. Chapters 1 – 4 is dominated with God’s activity as the judge. God judges in truth (2:2) and God judges through Jesus (2:16). God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement (3:25) and justifies those who have faith in Jesus (3:26). Chapters 5 – 7 focuses on Jesus’ part in the plan of salvation. Jesus came to die for us as our Substitute (5:6), we are justified by His blood (5:9), reconciled through Him (5:10) and He brings us eternal life (5:21). Paul completes his reflection on salvation’s plan by explaining the role of the Holy Spirit through whom we live (8:4 – 5). The Spirit governs the mind (8:6), lives in us (8:9), gives us life (8:10), raised Jesus from the dead (8:11), leads us (8:14), brings about adoption to sonship (8:15), testifies (8:16), helps us in our weakness and intercedes for us (8:26). There is abundant evidence not only this chapter, but in all Paul’s writing that suggest that the Spirit is not merely an impersonal divine power but a Person “presented in such close parallel to Christ that it is extremely difficult to regard Him as other than a distinct divine person.”6 I can therefore accept that “the Spirit of holiness” in Romans 1:4 is with reference to the Holy Spirit as a Member of the Trinity. In addition, “Spirit of holiness” was a common Jewish name for the Holy Spirit.7

I will now look at three reasons why Paul does not mention the Holy Spirit in his salutations. Firstly, according to Dr. Hyveth Williams, Professor in Homiletics at the Theological Seminary at Andrew University, the salutation used by Paul was the common greeting of the day. When you look at extrabiblical salutations you may find the same form being used. In fact, Paul combines a Greek greeting with the Jewish form. The Greek says “Chaire!” = “Joy to you!” and the Jew says “Shalom!” = “Peace!” “Not only, however, have these two greetings been joined by Paul but they have at the same time been transformed into one distinctively Christian salutation.”8

Secondly, Paul writes to newly formed churches made up of Jews whose worship and doxology was monotheistic, and Gentile converts whose former pagan lifestyles comprised of many strange gods. For such infant churches, the fullness of understanding of the place Holy Spirit in the Godhead was not a common theological concept. Hence, Paul would not reference the Holy Spirit in his salutation, but only later when he has expounded on the function and work of the Godhead and particularly that of the Holy Spirit.

My third explanation as to why Paul does not include the Holy Spirit in his salutation is based on the premise that Paul wrote his letters under inspiration as he was moved by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). God did not at some point become a Triune God. The Three Members Who comprise the Godhead are coeternal and coexistent. From eternity past the Godhead knew and recognized that because of their immense power, intellect and authority,9 it would be difficult to relate their exhaustless love to created beings. In the same way human beings love their pets and demonstrate this love to them by taking care of them, pets will always live in fear to humans due to their superiority.

A second problem faced by the Godhead is that with our human limitation we may perhaps find it awkward to worship three Gods. While there is no distinction between Their Deity, we often look upon the Father as the Superior among the Godhead and the Holy Spirit as a lesser Deity Who generally has a diminished function that simply does the bidding of the Father and the Son. The wonderful plan of redemption therefor provided that One took the form of an angel and then even stoop further down and took upon Himself humanity and so demonstrated the immense love of God. While maintaining complete Deity, They distinguished Themselves, One from Another, by taking up different duties in the work of salvation. These different duties resulted in Them assuming different appearances (e.g. Jesus’s part in the plan was to come and die for humanity and hence He had to take up humanity.) This action was completely voluntary. It is not because the Father owned some specific quality that made Him superior to the other Two members of the Godhead that He became the center of worship.

Jurgen Moltmann emphasized that the Father is understood to be the Father not because of patriarchal hierarchy, but only in relation to the Son, and by the relationship of the Son Jesus Christ to Him.10 The term “father” did not even exist before God created humans. It is that we may understand how They operate and relate to each other that we derive Their respective references. Because of Their great love for Each Other, the Son and the Spirit voluntarily submits, and the Father became the center of worship. As a result, because of the nature of His work, the Holy Spirit’s existence was probably not known until the creation of the world. Bear in mind, that until the rebellion of Lucifer, created intelligences probably didn’t even realize that there was a Law and that Michael, the Archangel, was Himself verily God. “Because of what (the Godhead) selflessly did back then, you are now able to understand the love of God … for each member of the Godhead to maintain a different position and appearance, do a different work, and take a different name, was selflessness in the extreme on the part of each of Them.”11

When one reads the Old Testament, one may infer that there is only God, Jehovah. It is only through the glass of the New Testament that we may extract Christologies and find that it was Christ Jesus who spoke to Moses at the burning bush, and later met with him on Mt. Sinai. The Old Testament directs all worship to Jehovah. It was the same Holy Spirit who was part of the arrangement discussed above Who inspired the Old Testament writers to write as they did.

In the Gospels, Jesus comes as God incarnate. Jesus comes as the brightness of God’s glory and the express of His image (Hebrews 1:3). “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From the days of eternity, the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the Father.”12 The fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Him (Colossians 2:9). Even though there are multiple references to the Father which is in Heaven and mention of the Holy Spirit, Christ never really introduced the Holy Spirit to His disciples until before His departure. An extensive discourse of the Holy Spirit and the nature of His work is provided by the beloved disciple in John 14 – 16. Part of His work, as outlined by Jesus is that He would “testify about (Jesus) . . . He will not speak on His own; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify (Jesus).” The Holy Spirit is God Himself, and not a subject of God. When the Holy Spirit glorifies Jesus, He directs all glory to Jesus instead of worshipping Jesus Himself. When Paul therefore writes under the influence of the Holy Spirit, it is the same Spirit who directed all worship to the Father in the Old Testament and to Jesus in the Gospels who allows Paul to write as he did.

Conclusion

Paul’s exclusion of the Holy Spirit in his salutations is in no ways a denial of the Holy Spirit as a distinct divine Person of the Godhead. Paul, who actively worked together with the Holy Spirit, writes too much of the uniqueness of the Holy Spirit for us to even begin to presuppose that Paul was opposed to the Holy Spirit and understood the Holy Spirit to merely be a divine force. Paul wrote under difficult circumstances and wrote to address that which was a concern at a specific church and therefore does not have time or need to write about every single piece of truth to which he subscribes. His salutations were the common greeting of the day, and neither Paul nor the Holy Spirit was too concerned that people may distort an entire doctrine based on how he greets the believers.
_______________________________________________
1Matthew 7:15-20
2E. G. White, Christ in His Sanctuary (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1969), 12.
3See United Church of God, Bible Study tools, accessed 29 April 2018, https://www.ucg.org/bible-study-tools/booklets/the-power-of-the-holy-spirit/paul-didnt-acknowledge-the-trinity
4Ibid.
5See R. Bowman, The Religious Researcher, accessed 29 April 2018, http://www.religiousresearcher.org/2008/10/20/faq-about-the-trinity-3-why-isn%E2%80%99t-the-holy-spirit-mentioned/
6E.J. Fortman, The Triune God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1982), 23.
7C.S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 246.
8W. Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapis, MI: Baker Book House, 1981), 48.
9V. Ferrel, Defending the Godhead (Altamont: Harvestime Books, 2005)
10J. Moltmann, The Trinity and the kingdom of God (London: SCM Press, 1981)
11V. Ferrel, Defending the Godhead, 12.
12E.G. White, The Desire of Ages (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1898), 19.